Riding the Iron Rooster (36 page)

I met a group of eight elderly pilgrims at Emei. They were all in their seventies and carried backpacks—ingenious wicker baskets—and walking sticks and food bundles. They were the classic instance of smiling and portable pilgrims.

"Where do you come from?"

"From Xitang."

Over three hundred miles away, in the northeast of Sichuan.

"Why did you come here?"

"To pray to our God."

"And we are now going to Wuhou Temple in Chengdu," one old woman said. "To pray."

The women wore a sort of nun's cap—a starched white cloth carefully folded and pinned; and they had thick socks, like leg warmers, and like the men they leaned on hiking staffs. They were bluff and hardy and very good humored. Some of the women smoked pipes, and one chomped on a cigar. The men wore cloaks with big sleeves. They said they had climbed to the top of the mountain. None of them wore anything sturdier than sandals or cloth slippers.

China has five holy mountains. It is the Chinese Buddhist's wish—and the wish of many foreign hikers—to climb them all. The trouble is that, being holy and being Chinese, they have been trampled for thousands of years. They have steps cut to the summit, and noodle stalls along the way, and kiosks selling postcards, monks selling strings of beads, hawkers, fruiterers and professional photographers who charge one yuan per pose. And along with the tough grannies toiling towards the top, there are the Americans in their Chinese T-shirts, Chinese in their American T-shirts, the Germans wearing rucksacks, and the French clutching the guidebook that says
Chine.
None of this makes the mountain less holy, but it makes the climb less fun.

For some reason, Emei was full of monkeys—frowning rhesus monkeys. They pestered pilgrims and snatched food and rode on the necks of their owners in a lazy and confident way, sitting on a man's neck, with their legs dangling over his chest. They picked their teeth as they rode along. On a back road near Emei I saw a man giving his monkey a piggyback ride, as he cycled—just like a father and child.

I stayed at what was described to me as the Railway University at Emei—it was Mr. Fang's doing. Actually it was the Institute of Communications, and it had 30,000 students. I was in the guest house, which, being new and "modern," had the bizarre touches that the Chinese reserve for their most expensive structures. And when these structures venture out of the realm of Chinese architecture altogether, they acquire things like concrete umbrellas on the terrace, padded velvet walls, fuse boxes in the dining room, murals of pandas, cactuses in the bathroom as a sort of suggestion that there is no water, very scary-looking bare wires protruding from the walls, water stains on the ceiling which take on the appearance of caricatures, and in the smallest rooms the most enormous sofas. The reflecting pool is another feature of such places. These pools were very entertaining—you never knew what you might find in them: dead fish, shoes, a bicycle wheel, rusty cans, chopsticks; but never anything as dull as algae. The one at Emei was full of water, and in the water a very large mirror that had plopped off the wall and shivered to pieces in the pool.

"What do you think of the guest house?" Mr. Fang asked me.

"Excellent," I said. "I want to stay longer."

But the cook sized me up and did one of the cruelest things any cook can do in rural China: he made me Western food—what he conceived to be Western food. Undercooked potatoes, pink chicken, boiled cabbage, and something so odd I had to ask its name.

"Bean—"

His English was like his cooking: strange mimicry. But I eventually found out what he was trying to tell me: wiener schnitzel.

Yet I enjoyed the place. I had felt the same in Inner Mongolia, at Jaiyuguan, Turfan and Urumchi—the wilder and emptier parts of China. I had had enough of Chinese cities. But this was pleasant, and it was possible to take long walks through the countryside, watching people hoeing or pigs wallowing, and in the far-off villages, the little kids doing homework in copybooks in front of the thatch-roofed huts.

***

The railway halt at Emei was at the end of a long, muddy road, and a market nearby sold fruit and peanuts to the pilgrims, who waited patiently, leaning on their walking sticks, for the train. And then, above the sound of sparrows and the whispers of bamboos, a train whistle blew. I liked these country stations, and it seemed perfect to sit there among the rice fields in the hills of Sichuan until, right on schedule, the big, wheezing train arrived to take me away, south into Yunnan. It was twenty-four hours to Kunming, and the train was uncharacteristically empty: I had a compartment to myself, and this one—because of the intense and humid heat—had straw mats instead of cushions.

"There are two hundred tunnels between here and Kunming," the conductor said when he clipped my ticket. No sooner had he gotten the words out of his mouth than we were standing in darkness: the first tunnel.

We were among tall conical hills that were so steep they were terraced and cultivated only halfway up. That was unusual in China, where land economy was almost an obsession. And the day was so overcast that waterfalls spilled out of the low cloud, and paths zigzagged upwards and disappeared in the mist.

So many tunnels meant that we would be among mountains the whole way—and hills and valleys, and narrow swinging footbridges slung across the gorges. The ravines were spectacular and steep, and the mountains were close together, so the valleys were very narrow. All of these magnificent geographical features had meant that the railway line had been difficult to build. In fact many of the engineering problems had been regarded as almost insurmountable until the early seventies when, with a combination of soldiers and convicts—a labor force that could be shot for not working—the line was finally finished.

The line could not go through the mountains of the Daxue range, and so it crept around their sides, pierced their flanks, and rose higher and circled until it had doubled back upon itself. Then you looked down and saw the tunnel entrances beneath you and realized that you had not advanced but had only climbed higher. Soon the train was in a new valley, descending to the river once again. The river was called the Dadu He (Big Crossing). It was wide and grayer than the sky above it. For most of its length it was full of boulders. Fishermen with long poles or ancient fish traps sat on its banks.

These were the densest, steepest mountains I had seen so far, and the train was never more than a few minutes from a tunnel. So, in order to read or write, I had to leave the lights burning in the compartment. One moment there was a bright valley with great white streaks of rock down its sides, and gardens near the bottom and vegetable patches sloping at a forty-five degree angle, and the next moment the train would be roaring through a black tunnel, scattering the bats that hung against the walls. This was one of the routes where people complained of the length of the trip. But it was easily one of the most beautiful train trips in China. I could not understand why tourists went from city to city, on a forced march of sight-seeing. China existed in all the in-between places that were reachable only by train.

"What do you want for lunch?" the chef said. This dining car was empty too.

"This is a Sichuan train, right?"

"It is."

"I will have Sichuan food then."

He brought me Sichuan chicken, hot bean curd, pork and green peppers, green onions stir-fried with ginger, soup and rice—a one-dollar lunch—and I went back and had a siesta. There were countries where train journeys were no more than a period of suspense, waiting to arrive; and there were countries where the train journey was itself an experience of travel, with meals and sleep and exercise and conversation and scenery. This was the latter. When I woke up in midafternoon I saw that the mist and cloud had dispersed. The long, hooting train had passed from low steep mountains into higher, broader ones.

I sat by the window and watched the world go by. Four black pigs, each one a different size, trotting in a file along a hill path. Some hills scarred with eroded gullies and others covered with scrub pine. Deep red valleys, the soil laid bare, and green bushy hills. The river was now the same red as that clayey soil. There were junipers at railway stations, fluttering and bowing, for it had now become windy. And five ranges of mountains visible, each with its own shade of gray, according to its distance. In a pretty valley town called Sham-alada, beyond the solid houses and tiled roofs, ten naked children turned somersaults on a mudbank and plunged into the red river. It was not late, but the sun slipped beneath the mountains, and then the valleys were full of long, cold shadows, as if the slopes had dragging cloaks.

Just before darkness fell, at the head of one valley, I saw a terrace below the rail line—a cemetery. It had a big stone gateway and a red star over the gate. That red star usually meant it had something to do with the People's Liberation Army. This one had fifty graves—rectangular stone boxes with flowers beside them. Except in the Muslim regions—like Xinjiang, or the Hui province of Ningxia—it was unusual to see cemeteries in China—new ones, at any rate. A cemetery is regarded as a waste of space. The dead are cremated and the ashes are put on a shelf in the family house, along with the tea leaves, the vase of plastic flowers, the photograph of Su Lin at the factory outing to Lake Hong, the combination thermometer-and-calendar and the needlepoint portrait of a white kitten playing with a ball of yarn.

I inquired about the cemetery.

The Head of the Train
(Heche zhang
), a man named Mr. He, said, "Those are the graves of the men who died while building the railway. It took ten years, you see."

Those ten years, from the early sixties to the early seventies, coincided with the period of patriotic fervor and intense jingoism. It not only had the largest number of self-sacrificing soldiers and workers, but also an enormous number of political prisoners. The efforts of these passionate people produced the Chengdu-Kunming line.

I slept, but fitfully, for each time the train entered a tunnel, the compartment howled with its noise and filled with smoke and steam from the engine. In the morning we were among bulgier, wetter mountains—the Yunnan valleys are cool throughout the year, because most of the province is at a high altitude.

A bad-tempered attendant banged at the door at seven. But knocking was only a formality. After a few knocks she used her own key to open the door, and she demanded the bedding.
Hurry up! Get out of bed! Give me the sheets! Do it now!
I thought: What nags these people can be.

"Why are the
fuwuyuans
in such a hurry to collect the bedding?" I ask the Head of the Train, Mr. He.

He said, "Because the train does not stay long in Kunming. Just a matter of hours, and then we turn around and go back to Chengdu."

That was why they were nags: they were overworked.

Mr. He had risen through the ranks. He had been a luggage handler, a conductor and a cook—all jobs at roughly the same salary level, about 100 yuan a month. He had joined when he was twenty—he said he hadn't had any education ("not much chance of it in the sixties") and I took that to mean that he was a casualty of the Cultural Revolution. He had chosen the railways because his father had been a railwayman. Now he was in total charge of this train.

"I was promoted by being appointed," he said. "I didn't apply for it. One day they simply came to me and said, 'We want you to be the Head of the Train,' and I agreed."

I asked him about travelers, because it seemed to me that one of the features of China now was the large numbers of people going cross-country.

"Yes," he said. "Especially in the last three or four years. Many travelers, of all kinds."

"Do they give you problems?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do they drink too much? Do they shout, or quarrel, or make disturbances?"

"No. They keep order. We don't have those sorts of problems. In fact, we don't have many problems. My job is easy. The Chinese obey the rules, on the whole. That's our nature."

"What about foreigners?"

"They obey the rules," Mr. He said. "Very few people break them."

"Are you a member of a union, Mr. He?"

"Of course. The Railway Workers' Union. Every worker is a member."

"What does the union do?"

"It offers opinions about conditions of work, and it discusses problems."

"Does the union discuss money?"

"No," he said.

"If conditions of work are bad—let's say if you're not given time for a nap or for meals—and if the union's opinions are not respected, would you consider going on strike?"

After a long pause, Mr. He said, "No."

"Why not? Railway workers go on strike all the time in Britain and the United States. There is a right to strike in China—it's in the constitution."

He rubbed his chin and became very serious.

"We are not serving capitalists," he said. "We are serving the people. If we go on strike the people won't be able to travel, and that will hurt them."

"That's a good answer, Mr. He. But now there are capitalists in China. Not only tourists from Western countries, but also the Chinese themselves are accumulating wealth."

"To me they are all passengers."

"I'm a capitalist myself, I suppose," I said.

"On my train you are a passenger, and you are welcome. Ha!" This
Ha
meant
Enough of this line of questioning!

"Mr. He, you mentioned you have a son." A child of six, in a school in Chengdu, was what he had said. "Would you like him to follow you and your father and work on the railway?"

"I'll tell you frankly—I would. But it's not my choice. It's up to him. I can't tell him what to do. At the moment, he wants to be a soldier in the army."

In the corridor the passengers were flinging their luggage out of the windows onto the platform at Kunming.

The Chinese flock to Kunming to gape at the colorful natives—twenty-three separate minorities, all gaily dressed in handsomely stitched skirts and quilted jackets, boots and headdresses. They come from the far-flung parts of Yunnan to sell their pretty embroidery and their baskets. They are attractive and a bit wild, and they look uncompromisingly ethnic. Mao's stern, gray policies were merely a hiccup in their technicolor tribalism. For the Chinese, the minorities in Yunnan are somewhere between hillbillies and zoo animals.